Modern consumer and industrial electronics, especially devices such as graphical display systems, televisions, projectors, cellular phones, portable digital assistants, and combination devices, are providing increasing levels of functionality to support modern life including three-dimensional display services. Research and development in the existing technologies can take a myriad of different directions.
Applications for these devices continue to provide greater functionality. In addition to conventional voice capabilities, these devices permit users to connect to a variety of information and media sources such as the Internet as well as watching movies, reading and writing text messages and emails, or making phone calls, at times concurrently. Unfortunately, as the richness and complexity of these applications increase, the complexity of the user interface increases commensurately.
For example, mobile devices have been developed in a variety of configurations, with various display options. It has become an increasingly greater challenge for the user to manage and control the use of these displays, particularly when the mobile devices support numerous applications that optimized for particular display configurations. Compounding this problem is the fact that users can position the displays in a host of orientations. Thus, one display or screen configuration may be optimal in one orientation, but not in another. Traditionally, the orientation of the device has not been fully integrated with the users' display preferences.
In some devices, the orientation can be changed by pressing a hard key of the device. However, due to the limited size of hand-held devices, additional hard keys are generally difficult to place on the device, and assigning an already existing hard key additional functionality, for instance that the hard key has to be pressed for a longer duration to call the additional functionality, may distract the user of the device.
In other devices, the change of the orientation is implemented as a menu option of a display menu. The user of the device then has to browse the devices menu and find the corresponding entry in order to change the orientation, which is a time-consuming and annoying task especially when the orientation is frequently changed. Furthermore, the unskilled user of the device may not be aware of the possibility to change the orientation or may get lost in the menu when searching for it.
In further devices, the change of the orientation uses motion sensors in the device to determine if the device itself is rotated by a user. This approach, however, deprives the user of the freedom to choose the orientation which is preferred to watch an image. Furthermore, this method may become unstable in a mobile environment where the device is subject to frequent relocation and shocks.
Thus, a need still remains for an electronic system with display mode mechanisms. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is increasingly critical that answers be found to these problems. Additionally, the need to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have been long sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.